Steve Ballmer is feeling the heat. Last month, he was so concerned with criticism of his leadership skills, he spilled some Redmond financial results he probably shouldn't have spilled.
"You tell me if I lack energy, conviction or we're not driving change we need to drive," Ballmer roared at Seattle's Rotary Club, before …

COMMENTS

The one thing I respected about M$

was their regular scheduling of product cycles which they did many moons ago to solidify their own internal development and allow corporations to budget for the future.

Now they are ending Vista support early and are pushing out other products faster than usual this corporate comfort has vanished. M$ product was never good in the early releases, not getting half-decent until SP2 or SP3. Now their users will be subject to more bugs and issues due to the accelerated release cycle.

"Access secret files, password hunter1"

early?

i'm just a consumer, no IT professional or any of that, but April? really? that seems mighty quick. 7 hasn't been out that long has it? doesn't seem like its been around long enough for MS to put together enough new features to make a compelling argument to upgrade.

maybe i'm wrong though. still, I'm in no hurry to upgrade again. 7 might be the next XP for this consumer.

I was thinking the same

not particularly early

Mickeysoft said quite some time back (2006, 2007, something like that) that they were going to a 3-year cycle. Vista SP1 was heaved out the door 4 Feb 2008 to OEMs and other early adopters, 15 Feb 2008 to MSDN subs, and 18 Mar 2008 to John Public so long as you spoke certain languages, 14 April 2008 to everyone else. Allegedly support will be dumped in April 2012. That's four years of support, one more than promised.

Vista SP2 was kicked out the door 26 May 2009, so if it also has four years of support then Vista's dead as of May/June 2013, or a year before XP SP3.

8 just a recompile?

Other than working on ARM what else is new in Windows 8? Will it basically be Windows 7 service Pack (insert relevant number) that they have also cross-compiled onto an ARM core?

If 9 is all voice and touchy then I can see that is like a huge GUI update... so perhaps we should wait for WinX when they have split the Windows 10 GUI system out into some separate server like lump; all we need is a catchy marketing name for a GUI server/client system possibly related to the number 10...

Not really

I lolled at that

Does Notes still come with that program you have to run when it's crapped in its own database for the umpteenth time and the client refuses to start with some obscure and un-helpful error message in a big red box? I think it was called zapnotes.exe or something...

Funnily enought

@ Abremms

Actually MS stated around the time of Vista that they were aiming to release a new version every three years from that point to help corps plan etc. Windows 7 was RTM July 22, 2009 so it will be three years next July, that does make it three months early but that's really not a massive difference in my oppinion.

@AC - Correct

CLR based system ?

It seemed to me that after XP the next Windows was intended to be .NET CLR based so that it could run on various CPUs, in particular on POWER based Cells.

It was only when this failed to eventuate that they took the Server 2003 kernel, added whatever was laying around and put together Vista. This was necessary to get out the door so that they could renew all the 3 year corporate contracts. One cycle (ending 2003/4) has resulted in no upgrades, they couldn't afford to miss another.

Windows 7 was Vista redone right.

It may be that Windows 8 will bring back the code from that earlier project in order to work on ARM, and possibly others. Perhaps next April isn't 'fast', but is 10 years after they started writing it.

Of course it may be that 'next April' and 'will run on ARM' are not related in any way and it will be x86 and x86-64 for some time.

What day in April will Windows 8 release?

Call Me A Luddite

But I'm still using Windows 2000. Even with brand new current hardware, I have yet to find a compelling reason to move to something newer. I use my three PCs for average home uses, P2P sharing, web browsing, email, some video editing, one PC is a video server, I burn CDs & DVDs, watch movies, play music and play a few games.

I tried Windows 7 several times, but even on my newest hardware, it was just plain SLOW! However, unlike many people, I'm nearly immune to advertiser BS as well as being a bit of a conspiracy theorist.

@Call Me A Luddite

Almost like me, but you are missing a big point - w2k has no more security updates!

So, for example, that serious flaw in thumbnail image decoding that can shaft your PC won't ever get fixed:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/04/windows_0day/

Something to consider very seriously if you use P2P, etc, to find media.

So while I still use my old copy of w2k for various MS-only software packages (CAD software, etc) I now run it in a VM most of the time and rely on Linux for all internet-facing tasks.

If I were in to PC games I probably would get Windows 7 & dual-boot with Linux, again keeping MS away from obvious security threats. But for now I see no compelling reason to do so, as there are not much in the way functional improvements in the OS other than bug-fixes for stuff they got wrong.

Notes Killer? er...um...Domino is the mail server

Exchange supports Notes as an email client, and Outlook can work with Domino as well with the Notes connector. Outlook is the competitor for Notes, and Domino and Exchange have been waging corporate strategic war over the last decade with Exchange slowly eroding the entrenched old school shops with massive migrations. The migrations have been part of Notes Switch (a misnomer) initiatives by Microsoft partnering with HP, EMC, and others who just wanted the storage swap.

I wonder...

re: baffling

He's a team leader, a good motivator but lacking the vision to be a strategic leader, who was promoted beyond his ability. It's the flip-side of the coin that sees chief executives b(r)ought into businesses about which they know nothing, with the expectation that they will perform as well as they did elsewhere.